Manage your subscription

Medical charities reject waste charge

By ELISABETH GEAKE

Charities that carry out medical research last week dismissed charges
that they waste public donations because they do not have proper strategies
for financing and assessing studies. The Association of Medical Research
Charities (AMRC) says the allegations, made by the magazine Charity Watch,
cannot be justified.

The report’s author, Kalwant Singh Ajimal, former research director
of the Spastics Society and managing editor of Charity Watch, says charities
review research proposals and results so sloppily that work is duplicated
unnecessarily. They make little effort to agree between themselves on what
work needs to be done, he says.

But Diana Garnham, the secretary-general of the AMRC, says its 79 members
make their awards according to agreed peer review procedures similar to
those used by the Medical Research Council. The association’s code states
that chairmen of funding committees should not be able to receive awards,
and that research proposals should be sent to assessors outside the charity.

In 1990, as a safeguard against duplicating research, the AMRC set up
a database of grants made by its members and the aims of the projects. Garnham
reckons the database lists about three-quarters of all charity-funded research
since then. ‘We have never found a case of double funding,’ she says.

Advertisement

Ajimal may have allegations but he has no clear examples of waste, says
Garnham. However, Charity Watch is about to conduct a survey of medical
charities to assess the extent of any incompetence.

On the allegation that charities do not collaborate, Garnham says: ‘Charities
are independent, they don’t like to be coordinated.’ Nevertheless, there
are examples of cooperation, such as the Institute of Molecular Medicine
at the University of Oxford – funded by a dozen charities.

Martin Scott, the Cystic Fibrosis Trust’s medical and scientific administrator,
says: ‘We have a strategy and we know where projects fit in.’ The Imperial
Cancer Research Fund says its research is overseen by a 20-member council.